


credo

by JaguarCello



Category: Journey's End - Sherriff
Genre: 2003 Iraq War AU, Alcohol Withdrawal, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, more or less, what am i doing with my life it's 1am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:41:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1364395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaguarCello/pseuds/JaguarCello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being in the desert (and he had never seen so many stars, or so much sand and sadness) might have given Stanhope a new perspective on things, but it didn't change the traitorous tug of his heart.</p><p> And god, he needed a drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	credo

It was too late for Stanhope to keep his eyes open and the dawn was approaching quickly enough that the birds were singing already, horribly chirpily. The air was warm already – dust and and the stench from the sewer blown open from an errant mortar the day before – and he could feel his sweat pooling under the balls of his feet and dripping down the back of his neck, sticking to the sheets. He rolled over, tangling his mosquito net in his fingers, and nearly fell off the narrow bed. He ignored Raleigh’s breathing, loud and strangely endearing, in the next bed.

He’d been reading Wilfred Owen the night before, the Killers loud in his ear (on repeat: _boy, one day you’ll be a man_ ) and thinking about home and the first dew on the lawns, and how the grass on the croquet lawn felt under his feet when he ran across it as a boy. He missed it with such intensity that he forced it out of his mind, and focused instead on politics and the sheer bloody pointlessness of it all. The Taleban, he’d considered (scrounging precious seconds to read blueys, and scrawling them back in ball-point with one hand on his rifle, desperate for any information) believed in a god and a holy cause. Most of his men (and he was thinking mainly of Trotter, here) believed in Page Three and cheap lager and Wall’s sausages – good men, brave men, but their interactions with God were limited to gasping blasphemies during sex or fights or watching the races.

Perhaps – and he rolled over again, and his book thumped to the floor – he was being unfair. Osborne said he was being unfair, whenever they sat at dinner to eat black forest gateau for the fourth time in three days or played cards, betting on cigarettes and wishing they had brandy or whisky or even _gin_ to wash down the endless pork casseroles with; the men were just men and Stanhope was no angel. But Osborne had been in the Army a long time, had seen action in Ireland (three of his men with their guts spilling out onto the tarmac, trying to press themselves back together as if skin could be melded by wishes) and had seen so much blood soaking the sand that he called warfare “the Coliseum”; men dying on the whims of their leaders and for little more than the brief flash of colour before it is raked under the foundations and forgotten.

“If only humanity could learn from its history,” Osborne had said to him a week previously, watching a young boy try to pick his pockets and then handing him a fistful of pens. “We’re fighting this war, which not many people understand unless they’ve got the intelligence services whispering in their ears, and even then it doesn’t seem to be true – “

Stanhope had laughed at that, but it wasn’t funny. “What was it they said, about the Great War? Lions led by donkeys? I don’t think we’re donkeys, but we certainly look like asses,” and that hadn’t been that funny either but Hibbert had laughed until his pinched, pale face was flushed. He was the same age as Stanhope, and left his hair a touch longer than regulation, and took any excuse to go home or go sick or be allowed to lie on his bed in the dark and think about impending doom or tax returns or girls he tried to fuck on leave. From the stories, he liked to emotionally abuse girls until they cried, and then rebuild their self esteem by fucking them; he was well-acknowledged across the entire regiment as a git.

“I’ve been speaking to an American,” Osborne began, “and his name was Gene, and according to Gene, the Italians still get alcohol in their rations. Just a tot, but that’s more than even the Navy get.” He paused, and looked round at the dusty tent and the men, frying an egg on the tarmac. “Not that the Navy would do much good around here,” and he reached for his water bottle, tipping the last drop down his throat. “Anyone for another drink?”

Stanhope’s hand twitched, and then again, and he hid it behind his back; one hundred and thirty-four days without a drink, and he felt it in every cell. “Please,” he said, and as Osborne turned to go – the scrape of his chair making the egg-friers look guiltily behind them – a jeep pulled up outside, and they heard low voices, and then James Raleigh walked through the door. Stanhope’s hand twitched again, but he ignored it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he managed, jamming his hand under his thigh to stop the shaking. “You – “

“Dennis!” Raleigh said, as if he could address a senior officer by his first name, and not even to bother making a show of saluting, and Stanhope closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, Raleigh was still standing there – face bright, the faintest of freckles across his nose, and tall and strong and (admittedly) handsome still, and grinning as if this were a joke.

“We had this conversation at school when I joined the OTC and then at Sandhurst: I joined the army, remember?” and he was taller, maybe, than Stanhope remembered, and far bolder. “But if – “ and he seemed to shrink, and was much more like the Raleigh he had known, frightened of being thrown into the deep end for admitting he could not swim – “If there’s an issue – “

“Raleigh!” Osborne said loudly, and handed him a bottle of water. Stanhope pretended not to notice it was his water bottle, and pretended not to think about Raleigh’s lips being where his lips had been, and he longed for Raleigh and for whisky and forced his eyes shut again.

“You’ve met?” he said, and then shook his head. “No, you must have met at Sandhurst, because I spoke to you both at my passing out parade,” and he tried to slump in his chair but couldn’t let himself relax. He decided to pick at his nails instead.

Osborne looked at him shredding the skin around his thumbnail for a few seconds, and then took a sip from his own bottle. “We’re not up to much. Just watching and waiting – ours not to reason why, and all that. The Taliban occasionally post videos of their mortar attacks on the Internet, which is entertaining, and we’ve come up with a rather good version of Bingo to play when we watch them,” he said, and nodded towards the bed next to his. “You can take that one. Dinner’s in about half an hour,” and Raleigh glanced at Stanhope before slotting his pack neatly between the bedside table and the bedframe.

“Mason?” Trotter – who had been sitting on his own bed, pretending to do a cryptic crossword but really writing what Stanhope suspected was poetry – yelled towards the far end of the tent. “Mason!” he said again, and Mason popped his head round the corner.

“Sir?” he asked, stirring a mug of tea with one hand.

“What’s for dinner?” Trotter asked, scratching behind his ear with the wrong end of the pen and leaving a black trail down his neck.

Mason took a deep breath, as if about to leap from a cliff into the ocean. “Chicken supreme, sir,” he called back, eyes shut in anticipation. A private – Private Duke, who spelled his name “Duck” – threw himself back onto the bed in paroxysms of agony, sending sherbet all over his bed. He got a trunk every few weeks from his mother back home in Bognor, full of sweets and with twelve toothbrushes in each one, one for each of his closest friends. Stanhope liked Duke – lethal, but also disarmingly sweet.

“Be brave, Raleigh,” Osborne said bracingly, and Mason pulled a face before disappearing with his tea. “Chicken supreme is the eighth wonder of the world, and we should have been left to wonder. It’s a – it’s an acquired taste. But then, I suppose, you lived through both Sandhurst and Stanhope’s mother’s cooking – “

 Stanhope let out a short laugh, and imagined he was smoking on a roof, aged fifteen and drunk. “My mother only learned to cook when our actual cook – a Mrs. Baker, if you can believe it – decided she had had enough of antidepressant-fuelled requests for custard with roast beef. Something to do with saving on washing up, as if my mother did the washing up. What is it they say about the rich? The only difference between being insane and being eccentric is the size of your attic?” He shrugged, and pulled at his boot laces.

“Your mother isn’t _that_ bad. I remember her making us an excellent cheese on toast one morning after we’d – “

“Hadn’t you better be learning your way around?” Stanhope interrupted, voice as smooth as he could manage. “Go and get me some camouflage paint,” he added, and retreated to his bed, and pictured a bottle of Laphroaig in his bedside table next to the pictures of his dog. He refused to eat dinner that night, claiming sickness, and tried not to think about Raleigh.

It was only at midnight, when the desert had grown so cold that the stars could have shattered, that he remembered he hadn’t asked after Raleigh’s sister at all, and as he lay wrapped in his mosquito net, with the sounds of the camp beginning to wake sounding loud in his ears, he thought about her. He thought about her eyes, so like her brothers, and how hard Raleigh had hit him when he’d found out that Stanhope didn’t really want to marry her at all. He very much didn’t think about how hard Raleigh had kissed him, later on, when his eye had bruised and his lip was split. He didn’t think about that at all, and he didn’t think about how Raleigh’s sleep-heavy breathing (even after a few years and fights and fucks in semi-public places) sounded the same in the Iraqi desert as it had done in a sunny bedroom, back before war and drink and heartbreak.

 He realised he was being melodramatic, and resolved to speak to Osborne, the keeper of his secrets, in the morning, and at last he slept.


End file.
